HW News - NVIDIA Re-Releasing RTX 3050, Intel Arc A580 Inbound, Epic Games Layoffs, PS5 Cooling

[Music] hey everyone welcome back to another Hardware news recap for the week we have a special report for you in this one I'm at epic games yeah no I'm serious and we're going to talk about some of the epic games layoffs we will also be going over Hardware news so there's some Rumors in the news this week we talking about counter- strike 2 updates that have uh improved performance in some instances but they have some more things to work on for frame time pacing and plenty more but we're going to start with this story before that this video is brought to you by Squarespace and visiting squarespace.com Gamers Nexus will give you 10% off your first purchase with them we've built a number of our own websites with Squarespace including our recently launched gamers. Nexus site where we list catastrophic PC Hardware failures to inform subscribers of those failures I built this site personally in a couple of hours by using squarespace's fluid engine to move blocks around visually until I liked it we also built our store website with Squarespace using its built-in e-commerce tools and of course we we built a website for our CEO snowflake because she demanded our audience know who really runs the show get to the core of your idea and spend less time on web design by signing up at squarespace.com Gamers Nexis or click the link below so as I said we're standing in front of Epic games' headquarters the brand new one no it like really it it may look like a post-apocalyptic hellscape but there nothing there's nothing written here that's positive so epic last week announced layoffs of at least 830 employees along with 250 members of its band camp and super awesome subsidiaries so there are upwards of 1,80 or so people who have been affected by these layoffs and first and foremost before we get into this story as we have it so far if you were one of those people or you have information from within that would be uh informative and helpful to provide some perspective Ive for the public as to what happened how how did epic go from riding so high to letting go of that many people instantaneously we'd love to hear from you email us at Epic Gamers nexus.net that is a special Standalone inbox I am the only person on the team who has access to it and I am obviously trained in keeping all information Anonymous uh if anyone wants to go on record and appear on camera then we can talk about that but if you want to provide Anonymous information that works as well uh no specific questions at this time other than we're seeking insight to what happened just cuz it it was a massive round of layoffs epic is a big company in the gaming world yes but 830 people that was by their count from Tim Sweeney about 16% of the workforce and then they had the other 250 on top of that from the other subsidiaries so that's not the only place that epic is cutting spending they also noted that they're trying to cut some of their legal fees they've been in a legal battle with Apple and Google for years now but alongside the legal expense concerns epic has our understanding is that epic is also pausing this project behind me this is where epic plans to build its next big headquarters we've been monitoring the project since it started back when epic games bought the derelict and functionally dead and more or less empty mall that used to sit here epic bought them all on December 31st of 2020 and it announced its purchase of the location on January 4th 2021 now this mall carry Town Center was formerly an icon of the town in the '90s and the early 2000s but it was a victim of Internet shopping and of stagnation on the front of the development and the owners of the mall the once iconic mall was around a million square ft on 32 Acres but epic's plans didn't involve keeping the buildings epic bought carry Town Center for $95 million and after about a year of it just sitting here and Epic going back and forth with the town for approvals which the town was uh unhappy about epic's performance regarding epic began tearing down the property in March of 2022 well we've come to learn from a town official I happen to know that the project is functionally paused at the moment and we checked the public GIS listings as well and that appears to confirm the case that's only part of what's going on here so in addition to the $100 million that epic spent on this dump currently uh and before to be fair I can say that I went there uh but in addition to the 100 million there the company was also after the purchase hit with a $520 million fine from the FTC you may remember that it had to do with buying v-bucks in fortnite and the FTC in that fine stated that epic was quote duping millions of players into making unintentional purchases so as of now epic has agreed to pay $275 million for that fine plus an additional 240 245 million in refunds for customers between this pre-construction campus which is basically just land and the fine epic is at $620 million in liabilities so it's over half a billion between a single fine and this plus it's got the legal expenses for apple and Google and that is from its ongoing project Liberty lawsuit against the companies which epic leveled against them due to their App Store payment policies and revenu split those legal fees have been extensive and the lawsuit started in 2020 although there have been legal decisions the battle remains active Plus for the past year fortnite's Revenue has declined and that's been epic's main Money Maker a predictable swing though as the game's been aging none of that is to count poor Investments made in a quote unquote metaverse which has questionable Prospect effects to begin with and all of this sets the backdrop for poor financial management and mismanagement of money and liquidity in a way which has now affected about a little over a thousand people between its properties 830 plus of which were from epic itself our understanding is that epic went from profitable to losing money within the course of just this year and epic posted the following regarding its layoffs it said quote as we shared earlier we are laying off around 16% of Epic employees we are divesting in band camp and spinning off most of super awesome Epic said about two-thirds of the layoffs were in teams outside of core development and it continually stressed the point of quote core development not being affected Sweeney the CEO stated that they've been spending more money than they've been making for a while now the FAQ on the website had some questions about what all this means and this is publicly available partly probably to epic's own employees cuz trying to preserve morale and uh one of the the things that was in the FAQ was simply quote will there be more layoffs to which the FAQ stated No period these changes financially stabilize the business today tweets stated that epic quote forgot to lay them off last week so they did it this week thus immediately contradicting the will there be more layoff statement unless you want to split that hair and that seems probably not the right one to split and that part specifically is one of the things we want to look into and it's why we want to hear from you if you were affected by this or have direct information about it here sa through friends it's not what we're looking for but if this affected you reach out epic said this it said quote saying goodbye to people who have helped build epic is a terrible experience for all the consolation is that we're adequately funded to support laid-off employees we're offering a severance package that includes six months Bas pay and in the US Canada and Brazil 6 months of Epic paid Healthcare we're offering to accelerate people's stock option vesting schedule through the end of 2024 and we're giving two additional years from today to exercise the options in the US we're also offering to vest any unearned profit sharing from their 401k and will provide benefits including career transition services and Visa support where we can although project Liberty was at least partially a business decision it's definitely partially a pride decision as well uh from the top and so of this the company had an FAQ quote we've been taking steps to reduce our legal expenses but are continuing the fight against Apple and Google a distribution monopolies and taxes so the quote metaverse can Thrive and bring opportunity to Epic and all other developers uh signaling to your opponents in a lawsuit that you're going to reduce legal spending probably not the best move but that's it for this story we're going to jump into the other Hardware news topics now I'm excited to come back to this one and investigate as we do some more digging cuz what we want to know was really just what went wrong how did how did it go from where it was to letting go of such a significant portion of its Workforce pausing massive project where now for people who live near this who get to drive by now instead of a partially usable location a a flattened Wasteland with occasional mountains of gravel uh but the good news is there's a lot of trash so you might be able to find something cool here I think I saw some needles earlier we're going to go to the next story now a check back for this one later okay we're back in the studio and we're going to talk about some extra credit bench works we did for Counter-Strike 2 so CS2 has had a ton of patches and actually we'll talk about balers Gate 3 briefly as well we ran benchmarks GPU for both games in the last couple days uh and CS2 in particular has had basically one patch per day since launch not all of them seem to have comprehensive patch notes maybe some of them just aren't noted yet or they were small bug fixes uh but they do have some that note performance changes and the good news is one patch per day or every two days or whatever uh it's great because of Val's trying to fix the game and they're trying to fix it quickly the downside is that from a testing perspective it makes it basically impossible for us because we can't keep up with their patching Cadence so we'll get through a bunch of cards and then they drop a patch that changes performance and now we're not really sure if we can even compare the two sets of data we have cuz they're patching along the way that's fine though it there's more uh for them to just fix the game than it does to keep it on a worse version so that people can bad mark it CU it's not really what it's designed for okay so we ran a few new numbers on the new version but not all of the uh cards have been run through of course and for those updates October second valve posted these patch notes they said fixed a bug with Shader compilation when connecting to a server that was causing hitches after connecting we definitely saw this one they said note that these hitches may still exist on AMD gpus we're working with AMD to address this improved performance of Molotov and incendiary fire extinguishing we're assuming they mean uh rendering performance and various crash fixes on October 4th they posted an update that stated this sort of critical detail removed model and texture detail very high setting since it was identical to high so they're actually changing the game Graphics settings now although technically they're saying they were the same thing that obviously brings us some concern for benchmarking purposes they also say they used to differ by texture filtering mode but that's a separate setting now uh the September 29th Chang is going back a bit included these various bug fixes for the Vulcan renderer which we've now tested uh and fixed a rendering issue in the name tag inspect panel now with the Vulcan renderer we ran some quick tests because some of you were requesting those benchmarks previously uh and in the last couple days we noticed that it was generally lower performance than the DirectX renderer and so see we would default the dx11 but if you have a different experience then let us know and more importantly let us know what Hardware you're on the CPU and the GPU because that may be affecting it now we've also found some bugs of our own notably when watching a replay we've noticed that the weapon switch and the weapon firing and carry animations don't seem to line the models up with the player hand models it doesn't look like that in gameplay so that's kind of weird we're not sure what's going on there uh valve also introduced a bug that we found I think a couple days ago where broke replays entirely for us but we found a work around we had to basically load into a match and then quit and then the replays would load but if we didn't do that loading a replay would just insta crash the game in most instances uh and when it didn't crash we had concerns obviously if the performance maybe be an effected anyway so we ran some quick tests with all this in mind to see if there's any Improvement and we did see some improvement in frame time pacing which is one of the things that valve was trying to fix with the Shader compilation issues they had uh so we did see some improvement there and we saw some improvement in performance consistency but that was one of the biggest problems we had with the first round of benchmarks is that it seemed like the game was sporadically really bad performance sometimes and in a way that wasn't predictable so we talked about this a lot in our launch benchmarks there's a a whole section on it if you want to see more of that but there were some problems with Shader compiling uh and just just sort of consistency issues in general so our RTX 470 1080 results were affected by this last time as well and we ran it with the new patches because these issues could have happened on any card and they did happen on other cards also uh so it was almost like an RNG like it's and we said this then too but it's like rolling the dice on if you get a good run or not and at some point that's just the game's natural performance even if the card doesn't make any sense to perform that way so the first note then is that when we retested the 470 with the newest patches we got way more appropriate but still low scaling results with an 8% lead over the RTX 370 that makes a lot more sense but they're still way closer than they should be based on the performance difference in some of the other games we've tested more recently so there's still some work here for valve to do the problem previously though was that it wasn't clear whether the occasionally really bad results were from a particular card driver test execution the game itself but the randomness and effectively beta launch status of the game made it likely the game it's good that valve is pushing so many fixes though especially for performance uh the last important downside again is that it affects how much we can really Benchmark so for now we can at least state that the new runs of some of the cards have improved with less volatility randomly tanking the performance Amy does still have some problems valve is right about that and we have a CPU Benchmark in the works but after that one goes out we're probably going to wait a while for valve to to hit a more steady uh stable launch so that we're not worrying about patches constantly coming out and changing performance or game Graphics settings one other thing Nvidia was seeing FPS in excess of 500 in its original uh reflex testing it published in an article so we noticed that was on an RTX 490 with a 12900 K uh and that was in its overpass testing and we weren't able to replicate those results so we asked Nvidia hey what are you doing to get these numbers and they said that they are using a bot match with only six bot and they're not firing at each other so they're disabling the bot combat basically um so that's it's a methodological difference the only thing that really matters is the relative scaling not the absolute FPS number we say this all the time as long as their relative scaling card to card is the same as in a real match that's really what's important here uh we haven't tested their way we're not sure if that's the case or not but our method doesn't produce numbers that high and that's because we're testing it in a way that's more realistic to the actual gaml play uh in our belief and so with actually a full match and with combat uh especially with smoke grenades and incendiaries which are both in our our test bench pass the frame rate is much lower as a result of those things but we think it's way more representative anyway the replay systems clearly a buggy mess from valve the game is getting better at least but uh as for Ballers Gate 3 we had a couple updates there as well Intel as we understand it is working on a general direct X11 Improvement driver again and this may affect the balers Gate 3 Performance so where we were able to work around its issues with Vulcan in the previous testing it sounds like Intel's working to address the directx11 performance issues with frame time pacing and balers gate may get Improvement there so if they do we'll follow up we'll just probably do it in a new video like this CU it won't be enough for a full Standalone up next the Intel Arc a580 GPU has been a long time coming Intel actually originally debuted this card in a spec sheet about September of 2022 and we covered it back then uh but it hasn't launched yet so there's been a new leak from Austrian retailer Galls which posted a product page for the ASRock a580 Arc GPU and that's in the Challenger Series of asrock's lineup and that card has some pictures and specs that were found by Momo us and posted to Twitter as a reminder if you had forgotten uh the a signifier is what marks the generation the architecture for inti Arc card so that's going to be Alchemist the five doesn't have anything to do with generation here unlike Nvidia or AMD where 5,000 6,000 7,000 or 20 30 40 are the markers of the generation so this isn't a different gen it's a same architecture as just a lower-end card so the ASRock card itself isn't too remarkable here just looking at the pictures that were posted it has a relatively large flowthrough area of the heat sink and it's just over two slots thick also video cards posted some leaked images of a sparkle a580 orc OC card with Sparkle's distinctive blue and black color scheme the a580 is listed as having 8 GB of gddr6 vram a 175 Watt tgp and 24x course this is in line with the initial specs published by Intel over a year ago now again in September 22 but it hasn't published anything official about the card since about two months ago it showed up in the geekbench results database indicating that someone's been testing out the new GPU and a mooore us also posted these leaked slides showing the arc lineup and timeline Intel is allegedly marking the RX 6600 and RTX 3050 as the main competing products to the a580 and it's targeting the end of Q3 or the start of Q4 for launch which is the time period we're in now overall the a580 is cut down a little bit from the a750 so it should be cheaper and that would start filling out the sort of lower end of the stack until currently has a380s in the sub $200 range it has the a750 at around let's say 250 or so but we've seen it as low as 200 it seems to have more frequent uh but but temporary sales than a lot of the other cards we've seen out on the market right now uh and so that would fill out the lowend now it's interesting that Intel would be targeting the 3050 as a competitor because it's an older architecture it's an older card but it becomes particularly relevant right now because there's a rumor of a new 3050 Nvidia is doing Nvidia things it's taking old names it's launching them again it's it's like the Call of Duty approach to gpus where the Activision goes what was pop was Cod 4 popular people like that one what if we like made another one and it had the same name so the new post comes from wccftech which alleges that Nvidia will be launching a new GPU in early 2024 and that would be the 3056 GB the rumor holds that it'll be based on Amper which is also signified by the name and they claim that would be on a a ga 10732 die with a narrower 96-bit memory bus and reduced 70 Watt tgp and this makes sense one of nvidia's biggest ways to down cost gpus has been restricting that memory bus and also reducing memory capacity those specs also line up pretty closely with the laptop variant of the 3050 with 6 GB of gdr 6 so it's possible Nvidia is just resp spinning it into a discrete card for desktop the big thing here to us is the possibility of a newer and more powerful GPU that does doesn't need any additional power aside from the 75 Watts the pcie slot can provide per spec even if it is from a last gen architecture it's an undeserved part of the market these days the no power connector gpus especially from Nvidia and that's with the most recent offerings being the gtx650 and the AMD RX 6400 both of which are 4 GB cards along with the Intel RC A380 there's still no sign of the RTX 4050 though or GTX if they we don't know which they're going to choose but uh that one was previously rumored to be arriving in June of 2023 obviously that date was missed or the rumor was just straight up wrong and as far as actual cards that have launched at the moment Intel is really the only company keeping the entry level alive in terms of new things and that's with again the A380 hopefully the a580 falls in that same sub $200 price glass cuz it's desperately needed and the best thing we have other than these cards for New Generation stuff would be Alternatives in the 30 series and the 6000 series again like the RX 6600 which remains particularly relevant up next EK is launching a mono block for liquid cooling PlayStation 5es uh this is the EK Quantum X cooling station mono block for PS5 and this does exactly what it says in the name it's very straightforward and uh you would basically disassemble your PS5 put this block on it and build out a system the mono block completely replaces the heat sink and the shell of the PS5 so it can't stay in the chassis unless you mod it that'd be kind of cool though uh and this requires full disassembly EK published a video guide to YouTube showing how you would do that and how to install the block and once finished the user would be left with a much Slimmer package overall versus the stock shell since this is just a monol block on its own it still needs the rest of a PC cooling Loop so that'd be a pump radiator fans all that stuff to operate it also requires a standard PCX or sfx power supply to power the PS5 and that can be done via a custom PCB that converts the ps5s two pin DC input to dual pcie 8 Pin thankfully the board and monoblock assembly will Mount to standard matx board standoffs which means it can go into any microatx or ATX case all the extra effort and Parts Plus the Steep $450 price tag puts this squarely into the doing it for fun category of modding it's super cool it's definitely not practical though and if you want to take on this project project make sure to pay close attention to ek's compatibility list early versions of the PS5 are listed not compatible with the monolock and EK also recommends using digital versions of the console without the disc drive as the monol block has no Provisions to keep one attached to the console on top of that system updates on the dis version of the PS5 require temporarily attaching the drive to the console for those updates and because of that EK left an access hole for the cable now in terms of casing it is supposed to fit with matx standoffs as we said and it should just fit in any microatx case with standard placing for those but because it's a PlayStation 5 board and not a microatx board it's possible that something out there doesn't work so make sure to look carefully at the uh shape and layout of the board and how it's going to fit in terms of depth with the block against the cases that you would like to use with it looks kind of fun um definitely impractical but you'd have something different from everyone else with a PS5 so uh this is a brief one Intel 14th gen specs basically confirmed at this point there've been a number of leaks over the last 6 months now and so the 14,000 series which is a refresh is supposed to be coming soon and that's not a new architecture but you can look at it as an amped up version of the 13,000 series we'll be hopefully testing that as well to see how it performs so there's some alleged official slides from the Japanese Market to show three CPUs the likely 49 00 K 14700 K and 14600 K and the same numbers here are asserted by previous leaks the assumed I 9 is shown with a Max frequency of 6 GHz 8p cores and 16 e cores the alleged i7 is shown with a rumored 8p core 12 e core layout and a much lower 5.6 GHz clock now there were leaks just recently that indicated it up to about 5980 or roughly 6 GHz for the 14700 K so that's one where the leaks are contradicting themselves and we're just going to have to test it last is the assumed I5 with 6p cores 8 e cores and a 5.3 GHz clock the most notable change versus the 13th gen would be that middle i7 as we've noted before bumping to 12 eor that represents a possible strong value in CPU intensive workloads it'll depend on their price but we hope to be running productivity and game benchmarks soon up next is a huge Aza case to as a like the company uh so Aza and its new big Aza case is the Messa Iceberg and it's interesting certainly distinctive this case shape follows after the various other pyramids and floating cubes that aza's made in the past Aza says that it's quote inspired by The Contours of an iceberg it's poetic maybe not the best imagery we immediately thought of the Titanic and sinking but they could partner with EK and make something cool with that it's a very large bench style case called the meso with asymmetrical angles and panels that actually do give it a pretty unique look all the side panels are removable for Access and inside there's a raised platform for the motherboard with room for a power supply underneath the front edge has a mount for a 360 mil radiator and a single exhaust fan goes in the back despite its large size the case can only support CPU coolers up to 140 mm tall so liquid cooling is basically the way to go here we're a little concerned about hot air building up in the top of the case above the GPU and possibly being recirculated it's also very expensive although it looks cheap in comparison to the last few stories at $370 so this is probably only going to sell to those who are really dedicated to the look as a quick mention asza is also launching the sanctum case which is a dual chamber box with the corner chopped off we're assuming they ran out of money when making the tooling it's also very large with an aluminum and glass exterior and the right side and back panel are mostly mesh this one supports at least eight fans and multiple radiators up next is an update to Windows exciting we know but this one actually brings the long promised changes of RGB control integration uh so Windows 11 can now natively control some RGB uh LEDs and lights and peripherals and the new feature is called Dynamic lighting this leverages the open hid lamp array standard and should be available in the latest round of updates it's part of the personalization menu and it allows control of color and effects per device multiple manufacturers have partnered with Microsoft including Asus Logitech and Razer this can start helping with some of the RGB control issues but it doesn't solve some of our deeper issues in the industry we've talked about in the past with Wendell talking about the open pleb initiative where actually a number of Manufacturers have expressed interest there we have updates in the future but it doesn't resolve things such as the physical connectors differing so there's no real standard there it's chaos and now there's even manufacturers suing each other over uh RGB pass through type designs and it ALS also doesn't resolve the concern of open sensors and allowing things like motherboard sensors to be tapped into by software with design guides or at least a level of openness but this is in theory a move in the right direction to unify at least RGB control which is absolutely chaos right now it's a complete mess and getting around vendor locks and the necessity for multiple RGB software programs on the same system would be a big move forward in practice full control is only guaranteed on a select list of devices with more on the way in the future if you want the update now make sure you have Windows update set to get the latest updates as soon as they're available so that's it for this Hardware news recap as always thank you for watching subscribe for more and as a reminder we have the charity drive going on where we're giving 10% of our store Revenue to cat Angels the local cat shelter we've worked with for a number of years now uh over the next couple of weeks and so if you want to contribute to them and to us you can grab something on store at gamas access.net thank thanks for watching we'll see you all next time

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 224,003

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, intel arc a580, epic layoffs, epic games, native rgb windows 11, nvidia rtx 3050 6gb, nvidia rtx 3050 2023, intel 14900k, intel 14700k, intel 14600k

Id: O87yzyfOfnY

Length: 28min 59sec (1739 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 06 2023